<p>Gooduniforme, it really depends on the rest of your academic profile and your major. The best way I can put it is that calculus is a boost; but the lack of calculus is not considered a deficit. If you want to go into math or sciences, you should take calculus. If your interests lie elsewhere, you really should take the course that is best for your individual academic needs. </p>
<p>My daughter was accepted this year to Univ. of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and Barnard (the school she will be attending). She did not take any math beyond Algebra II, which she took in her sophomore year. So Junior/Senior year= no math. There was a reason for this, of course: my daughter took 4 years of Russian, through AP Russian, in her high school; and she spent half of her junior year living in Russia & attending a high school there. When she got back she was not allowed to enroll in trig mid-year, and the following year it was impossible to fit trig into her schedule along with all her other requirements to graduate. Her high school does not offer a true calculus course, though students can opt to take an online course. Of course she explained these facts in her applications. But the main point is that she had the profile of a student with a passion for studying a foreign language – so obviously she was evaluated in that context. </p>
<p>I don’t know what your background and interests are, but it is mistake to think that you have to choose all your courses simply to look good for the colleges. What you really need to do to get into the very top colleges is to differentiate yourself in some way from the other applicants – so you should be focusing on your academic strengths while at the same time maintaining some balance in your high school course load. So for example, it wouldn’t be a good idea for a prospective history major to drop math entirely in order to add an extra history class, but if the student must choose between an AP Europeon History and AP Calc class offered at the same time, maybe for that particular student the AP Euro class is the better choice.</p>
<p>By the way, my daughter comes from a small urban public high school and just about every year there is a student admitted to Harvard or Yale- obviously without calculus. (I don’t know whether any of these kids has taken the on-line calc course the school offers, but I know that that is not AP and none of the kids who have taken it would be prepared for the AP exam). Of coures it is a little different with a school that does not offer the course, since the GC will be sure to point that out – but the point is that the Ivies do accept kids without calculus.</p>